c The pyramid known as Absalom’s Pillar in the Kidron Valley was first mentioned by Benjamin of Tudela in AD 1170 and it does not date from 1000 BC. It is actually a first-century BC tomb. In the Middle Ages, the Jews, banned from the city and even from the Western Wall, prayed close to the Pillar. Even into the early twentieth century, passing Jews used to spit or throw stones at it to signify their disgust for Absalom’s disloyalty.
d Several hundred years later, John Hyrcanus, the Maccabean king, was said to have plundered David’s tomb to pay off a foreign conqueror. Two thousand years after that, during the Crusader Kingdom, workmen repairing the Cenacle on Mount Zion, where Jesus took his last supper, discovered a room that they thought was David’s tomb. This became a site revered by Jews, Christians and Muslims alike. But the real site of David’s tomb remains a mystery.
e Where was the Holy of Holies? This is now a politically explosive question and an intractable challenge for any Israeli–Palestinian peace deal sharing Jerusalem. There are many theories, depending on the size of the Temple Mount which was later extended by Herod the Great. Most scholars believe it stood atop the rock within the Islamic Dome of the Rock. Some argue that this mysterious yellow, twisted cavern was originally a burial cave of around 2000 BC, and there seem to be folk memories of this: when exiles returned from Babylon around 540 BC, they were said to have found Araunah the Jebusite’s skull. The Mishnah, the compilation of oral Jewish traditions of the second century ad, calls it the Tomb of the Abyss, hollowed for “fear of any grave in the depths.” The Muslims called it the Well of Souls. Jews and Muslims believe this was where Adam was created and Abraham almost sacrificed Isaac. It is likely that in AD 691, the caliph Abd al-Malik chose the site for the Dome at least partly to create an Islamic successor to the Temple. Jews regard the Rock as the foundation stone of the Temple.
f The Bible cites the fortresses of Megiddo, Gezer and Hazor as Solomon’s store-cities. But in the debates of the twenty-first century, revisionists, led by Professor Israel Finkelstein, argue that they are actually Syrian-style palaces built a hundred years later, leaving Solomon without any buildings. Other archaeologists challenge the revisionist dating. The black-on-red pottery found at these sites belongs in the late tenth century BC, roughly the time of Solomon’s reign and Pharaoh Sheshonq’s invasion, nine years after the king’s death, while exciting new analysis of the buildings suggests they were indeed huge, tenth-century stables, and therefore plausibly evidence of Solomon’s cavalry power and Mediterranean horse-trading operations. The debate continues.
CHAPTER 4
The Kings of Judah
930–626 BC
REHOBOAM VERSUS JEROBOAM: THE SPLIT
When Solomon died in 930 BC after a reign of forty years, his son Rehoboam summoned the tribes to Shechem. The northerners chose the general, Jeroboam, to tell the young king that they would no longer tolerate Solomon’s taxes, “I will add to your yoke: my father hath chastised you with whips,” replied the brash Rehoboam, “I will chastise you with scorpions.” The ten northern tribes rebelled, anointing Jeroboam as king of a new breakaway kingdom of Israel.
Rehoboam remained king of Judah; he was David’s grandson and he possessed the Temple of Jerusalem, the home of Yahweh. But the more experienced Jeroboam, who made his capital at Shechem, faced up to this: “If this people go up to do sacrifice in the house of the Lord at Jerusalem, then shall the heart of this people turn again unto Rehoboam King of Judah and they shall kill me.” So he built two mini-temples at Bethel and Dan, traditional Canaanite shrines. Jeroboam’s reign was long and successful, but he could never match Rehoboam’s Jerusalem.
The two Israelite kingdoms were sometimes at war with each other, sometimes close allies. For around four centuries after 900 BC, the Davidic dynasty ruled Judah, the small rump around the royal Temple city of Jerusalem, while the much richer Israel became a local military power in the north, usually dominated by charioteer generals who seized the throne in bloody coups. One of these usurpers killed so many of the ruling family that “he left him not one that pisseth against a wall.” The authors of the Books of Kings and Chronicles, writing two centuries later, were not concerned with personal detail or strict chronology but judged the rulers by their loyalty to the one God of Israel. Fortunately, however, the Dark Age was over: the inscriptions of the empires of Egypt and Iraq now illuminate—and often confirm—the furiously righteous pontifications of the Bible.
Nine years after Solomon’s death, Egypt and history returned to Jerusalem. The pharaoh Sheshonq, who had encouraged the breakup of the Israelite united monarchy, marched up the coast, swerving inland towards Jerusalem. The Temple was rich enough to make such a detour lucrative. King Rehoboam had to buy off Sheshonq with the Temple treasury—Solomon’s gold. Attacking both Israelite kingdoms, the pharaoh devastated Megiddo on the coast where he left an inscription on a stele boasting of his conquests: a tantalizing fragment survives. On his return, he advertised his successful raid at his Temple of Amun in Karnak. A hieroglyphic text at Bubastis, then the pharaoh’s capital, shows that soon afterwards Sheshonq’s heir Osorkon dedicated 383 tons of gold to his temples, probably the loot from Jerusalem. Sheshonq’s invasion is the first biblical event confirmed by archaeology.
After fifty years of fighting, the two Israelite kingdoms made peace. King Ahab of Israel had made a prestigious marriage to a Phoenician princess, who became the Bible’s arch-monstress, a corrupt tyrant and worshipper of Baal and other idols. Her name was Jezebel and she and her family came to rule Israel—and Jerusalem. They brought butchery and disaster to both.13
JEZEBEL AND DAUGHTER, QUEEN OF JERUSALEM
Jezebel and Ahab had a daughter named Athaliah whom they married to king Jehorah of Judah: she arrived in a Jerusalem that was thriving—Syrian merchants traded in their quarter, a Judaean fleet sailed the Red Sea and the Canaanite idols had been expelled from the Temple. But Jezebel’s daughter did not bring luck or happiness.
The Israelites had flourished only while the great powers were in abeyance. Now in 854, Assyria, based around Nineveh in modern Iraq, rose again. When the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III started the conquest of the Syrian kingdoms, Judah, Israel and Syria formed a coalition to resist him. At the Battle of Karkar, King Ahab, fielding 2,000 chariots and 10,000 infantry and backed by the Judaeans and the various Syrian kings, halted the Assyrians. But afterwards, the coalition fell apart. The Judaeans and Israelites fought with the Syrians; their subject peoples rebelled.a King Ahab of Israel was killed by an arrow—“dogs licked up his blood.” A general named Jehu rebelled in Israel, slaughtered the royal family—stacking the heads of Ahab’s seventy sons in a heap at the gate of Samaria, and assassinated not only the new king of Israel but the visiting king of Judah too. As for Queen Jezebel, she was tossed out of her palace window, to be pulverized under chariot-wheels.b
Jezebel’s carcass was fed to the dogs in Israel but in about 841 BC, Jezebel’s daughter, Queen Athaliah, seized power in Jerusalem, killing all the Davidian princes (her own grandchildren) that she could find. Only one baby prince, Jehoash, was saved. The second Book of Kings—and some new archaeological finds—here deliver the first glimpse of life in Jerusalem.14
The princeling was hidden in the Temple complex while Jezebel’s half-Phoenician, half-Israelite daughter attracted cosmopolitan trade and Baalist worship to her small mountain capital. An exquisite ivory dove perched atop a pomegranate, less than an inch high, was found in Jerusalem; it was probably used to decorate a piece of furniture in a grand Jerusalem house. Phoenician clay seals—known as bullae, the headed notepaper of the day—have been found around the rock pool below the City of David with images of their ships and holy totems such as a winged sun over a throne, along with 10,000 fishbones, probably imported from the Mediterranean by these ocean-going traders. But Athaliah was soon as hated as Jezebel. Her idolatrous priests set up Baal and other gods in the Temple. After six years, the Temple’s priest called Jerusalem’s grandees
to a secret meeting and revealed the existence of the little prince, Jehoash—to whom they immediately swore loyalty. The priest armed the guards with the spears and shields of King David, still stored in the Temple, and then publicly anointed the child, crying “God save the king” and blowing trumpets.
The Queen heard “the noise of the guard and the people” and rushed through the acropolis from the palace into the neighbouring Temple, now packed with people. “Treason! Treason!” she cried, but the guards seized her, dragged her off the holy mountain and killed her outside the gates. The priests of Baal were lynched, their idols smashed.
King Jehoash ruled for forty years until about 801 when he was defeated in battle by the Syrian king, who marched on Jerusalem and forced him to pay out “all the gold in the treasures” of the Temple. He was murdered. Thirty years later, a king of Israel raided Jerusalem and plundered the Temple. From now on the growing wealth of the Temple made it a tempting prize.15
Yet Jerusalem’s remote prosperity was no match for Assyria, energized under a new king: that carnivorous empire was again on the march. The kings of Israel and of Aram-Damascus tried to put together a coalition to resist the Assyrians. When King Ahaz of Judah refused, the Israelites and Syrians besieged Jerusalem. They could not break through the newly fortified walls, but King Ahaz despatched the Temple treasury and an appeal for help to Tiglath-Pileser III of Assyria. In 732, the Assyrians annexed Syria and ravaged Israel. In Jerusalem, King Ahaz agonized over whether to submit to Assyria or fight.
ISAIAH: JERUSALEM AS BEAUTY AND HARLOT
The king was advised by Isaiah, prince, priest and political consigliere, to wait: Yahweh would protect Jerusalem. The king, said Isaiah, would have a son named Emmanuel—meaning “God with us”—“For unto us a child is born” who would be “the Mighty God, the everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace,” bringing “peace without end.”
There were at least two authors of the Book of Isaiah—one of them wrote over 200 years later—but this first Isaiah was not just a prophet but a visionary poet who, in an age of voracious Assyrian aggression, was the first to imagine life beyond the destruction of the Temple, in a mystical Jerusalem. “I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne high and lifted up and his train filled the temple … and the house was filled with smoke.”
Isaiah loved the “holy mountain,” which he saw as a beautiful woman, “the mount of the daughter of Zion, the hill of Jerusalem,” sometimes righteous, sometimes a harlot. The possession of Jerusalem was nothing without godliness and decency. But if all was lost and “Jerusalem is ruined,” there would be a new mystical Jerusalem for everyone “upon every dwelling-place,” preaching loving-kindness: “Learn to do well; seek judgement; relieve the oppressed; judge the fatherless; plead for the widow.” Isaiah foresaw an extraordinary phenomenon: “the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established in the top of the mountains … and all nations shall flow to it.” The laws, values and stories of this remote and perhaps vanquished mountain city would rise again: “And many people shall go and say, Come ye and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the House of the God of Jacob; and he will teach us of his ways … Out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. And he shall judge among the nations.” Isaiah predicted a mystical Day of Judgement when an anointed king—the Messiah—would come: “they shall beat their swords into ploughshares and spears into pruning-hooks … and neither shall they learn war anymore.” The dead would rise again. “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb and the leopard shall lie down with the kid.”
This incandescent poetry first expressed the apocalyptic yearnings that would run throughout Jerusalem’s history until today. Isaiah would help shape not only Judaism but Christianity. Jesus Christ studied Isaiah, and his teachings—from the destruction of the Temple and the idea of a universal spiritual Jerusalem to the championing of the underdog—derive from this poetical vision. Jesus himself would be seen as Isaiah’s Emmanuel.
King Ahaz travelled to Damascus to make obeisance to Tiglath-Pileser, returning with an Assyrian-style altar for the Temple. When the conqueror died in 727 BC, Israel rebelled, but the new Assyrian king Sargon II besieged Samaria the capital for three years and then swallowed Israel, deporting 27,000 of its people to Assyria. Ten of the Twelve Tribes, who had lived in the northern kingdom, almost vanish from history.c The modern Jews are descended from the last two tribes who survived as the Kingdom of Judah.16 The baby whom Isaiah had hailed as Emmanuel was King Hezekiah, who was no Messiah but nonetheless possessed the most priceless of all political qualities, luck. And traces of his Jerusalem survive today.
SENNACHERIB: THE WOLF ON THE FOLD
Hezekiah waited twenty years for a chance to revolt against Assyria: first he purged the idols, shattering the bronze snake that stood in the Temple, and summoned his people to celebrate an early version of Passover in a Jerusalem which was expanding for the first time on to the western hill.d The city filled with refugees from the fallen northern kingdom, and they probably brought with them some of their ancient scrolls of early Israelite history and legend. Jerusalem’s scholars started to fuse together the Judaean traditions with those of the northern tribes: ultimately these scrolls, written just as the Greeks were recording Homer’s epic poem the Iliad, would become the Bible.
When Sargon II was killed in battle in 705, the Jerusalemites, even Isaiah, hoped it marked the fall of the evil empire. Egypt promised support; the city of Babylon rebelled and sent ambassadors to Hezekiah, who felt his moment had come: he joined a new coalition against Assyria and prepared for war. But, unfortunately for the Judaeans, the new Great King of Assyria was a warlord of apparently endless confidence and energy: his name was Sennacherib.
He called himself “King of the World, King of Assyria” at a time when the titles were synonymous. Assyria ruled from the Persian Gulf to Cyprus. Its landlocked heartland in today’s Iraq was defended by mountains to the north and the Euphrates in the west but was vulnerable to attack from south and east. The empire resembled a shark that could survive only by constant consumption. For the Assyrians, conquest was a religious duty. Each new king swore at his accession to expand what they called “the land of God Ashur”—the country was named after its patron god. The kings were both high priests and commanders who led their 200,000-strong armies in person, and like the tyrants of modern times, they cowed their subjects using not just terror but vast deportations of peoples from one end of the empire to another.
The body of Sennacherib’s father was never recovered from the battlefield, a terrible sign of divine displeasure, and the empire started to break up. But Sennacherib smashed all the rebellions and when he recaptured Babylon, he destroyed the entire city. But once order was restored, he tried to consolidate, extravagantly rebuilding his capital Nineveh, city of Ishtar, goddess of war and passion, with canals irrigating its gardens and his massive Palace Without Rival. The Assyrian kings were avid propagandists, whose triumphalist decorations on the walls of their palaces advertised Assyrian victories and the gruesome deaths of their enemies—mass-impalings, flayings and beheadings. The courtiers of conquered cities paraded through Nineveh wearing the heads of their kings on ghoulish necklaces around their necks. But their depredations were probably no more vicious than other conquerors: the Egyptians, for example, collected the hands and penises of their enemies. Ironically Assyria’s most brutal era was over; Sennacherib preferred to negotiate if possible.
Sennacherib buried records of his achievements in the foundations of his palaces. In Iraq, archaeologists have found the remains of his city, revealing Assyria at its apogee, made rich by conquest and agriculture, administered by scribes whose records were preserved in royal archives. Their libraries contained collections of omens to aid royal decision-making, and of incantations, rituals and hymns to maintain divine support, but also tablets of literary classics such as the Epic of Gilgamesh. Worshipping many gods, revering magical figurines and spirits and calling upon the po
wer of divination, the Assyrians studied medicine, writing prescriptions on tablets that read: “If the man is suffering from the following symptoms, the problem is … Take the following drugs …”
Israelite prisoners, toiling far from home in the resplendently gaudy cities of Assyria with their Babel-like ziggurat towers and painted palaces, saw them as metropolises “of blood, full of lies, full of plunder, never without victims!” The prophet Nahum described “the crack of whips, the clatter of wheels, galloping horses and jolting chariots!” Now those eight-spoked chariots, those vast armies and Sennacherib himself were marching on Jerusalem, swooping down, says Deuteronomy, “as swift as an eagle flieth.”
HEZEKIAH’S TUNNEL
Hezekiah knew what horrors had befallen Babylon; he frantically built fortifications around Jerusalem’s new quarters. Sections of his “broad wall,” 25 feet wide, survive today in several places but most impressively in the Jewish Quarter. He prepared for a siege by ordering two groups of craftsmen to hack a tunnel 1,700 feet through the rock to link the Gihon Spring outside the city to the Siloam Pool, south of the Temple Mount below the City of David, which now, thanks to his new fortifications, lay inside the walls. When the two teams met up deep in the rock, they celebrated by carving an inscription to record their amazing achievement:
[When the tunnel] was driven through. And this was the way in which it was cut through. While [they were] still [excavating with their] axes, each man toward his fellow, and while there were still three cubits to cut through, [they heard] the voice of a man calling to his fellows, for there was a fissure in the rock on the right [and the left]. And when the tunnel was driven through, the quarrymen hewed [the rock], each man toward his fellow, axe against axe; and the water flowed from the spring toward the reservoir for 1,200 cubits and the height of the rock above the heads of the quarrymen was 100 cubits.e
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